We promise not to disappoint in this week’s takeaways from politics in New Jersey. Before we get to the really juicy stuff, let’s start with a little business from Trenton involving the governor, a professional wrestler and a video camera.

The professional wrestler and actor, whose given name is Dwayne Johnson, was featured in a little item the administration cooked up in advance of the governor’s “No Pain, No Gain” tour, in which he is planning to advocate for another round of pension reform.

The video was described this way by Asbury Park Press writer Dustin Racioppi:

“The trailer was billed in an administration email as ‘a must see’ and an ‘over-the-top summer action movie blockbuster.’ It is something straight out of Michael Bay for beginners -- eerie tones, apocalyptic drum beats, a finale of explosions. Bay is best known for the Transformer movies.”

The question, though, is how did this happen in the first place? The administration isn’t really talking about it, but it seems like a slam dunk. When you put a video like this together, you get permission from public figures for their appearance in it.

It was an embarrassing mistake for an administration that supposedly wasn’t going to make embarrassing mistakes. Not on the level of closing access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, but still…

Egea at the table

Speaking of the bridge scandal, Regina Egea, a key aide to Christie, had her time in the hot seat before the Legislature’s special committee investigating the lane closings this week.

The biggest piece of information to come out of her testimony is that she spiked a text she sent to Christie about Bill Baroni’s testimony before a legislative committee in December. The former deputy director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, at that hearing, gave a vigorous defense of what was then thought to be a traffic study.

Egea said she didn’t remember if Christie texted her back.

The key point of this revelation, however, was brought out by investigative panel co-chair John Wisniewski, a Demcratic assemblyman from Middlesex County. Gibson Dunn, the law firm that conducted the Christie administration’s internal review of the involvement of the governor’s office in the scandal, said its work was comprehensive. Christie has repeatedly echoed that assessment. Why, then, wasn’t the spiked email caught?

"The fact that they imaged her phone, and we didn't get that document, is very disturbing, because it seems to me if they imaged her phone, and it had been deleted, they still would have had that data," Wisniewski said.

And that casts even more doubt on the thoroughness of that $3 million report.

A scandal not of our making

New Jersey has had its share of scandals. We don’t need to mention them all, but from governors putting their lovers on the state payroll to closing traffic lanes to bridges (see above), there are plenty.

But sometimes, scandal visits us. Asbury Park Press writer Erik Larsen told the tale this week of President Warren Harding who set up his mistress and his daughter, whom he never met, in a house in Asbury Park.

It’s hard to imagine anything like this happening today. The mistress and child would likely be discovered, not unlike former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards' paramour was found, and that would be that.

How would that have changed things? Harding likely would not have been elected. He died in office, so no Calvin Coolidge. What that might have meant for Herbert Hoover is anyone’s guess.

The affair was never broadcast during Harding’s lifetime. But his mistress, Nan Britton, did do something very 21st century four years after the president’s death: She wrote a tell-all book, complete with the dirty details, as described in this Amazon.com entry:

“In Chapter 18 she describes how on July 30, 1917 she finally lost her virginity to the future president after a long courtship, in a New York City hotel on 30th Street overlooking Broadway. Only moments after the intercourse had been completed, the New York City Vice Squad broke down the door. Harding was forced to identify himself. When the police realized that their target, Warren G. Harding, was a United States Senator (he was not yet president), the Vice Squad apologized and beat a hasty retreat.”

If this happened now, she’d be in a reality television show, challenging Kim Kardashian for cable supremacy. Alas, Britton died in 1991.